Roscoe Turner, the Three-Time Thompson Trophy Champion, and the Lion Cub Named Gilmore Who Flew Every Race With Him

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy Race three times - 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a record no other pilot has matched in the history of the National Air Races at Cleveland. A self-made pilot from Corinth, Mississippi with no money, no connections, and no formal education, Turner built one of the most recognizable names in American aviation through genuine skill and an instinct for spectacle that never got in the way of the flying. He is a member of the National Aviation Hall of Fame and trained more than 3,000 military pilots during World War II - and yes, he once flew coast to coast with a lion cub in his cockpit.

Who Was Roscoe Turner?

Turner was born in 1895 in Corinth, Mississippi. He served in World War I as a balloon observer and returned in 1918 with an appetite for aviation and no money to feed it. He taught himself to fly through persistence and opportunism - trading ground work for cockpit time, talking his way into aircraft wherever an opening presented itself.

By the early 1920s he was barnstorming: loading a patched Jenny into farm fields, putting up hand-lettered signs by the road, and charging locals a dollar for five minutes in the air. He was one of aviation’s traveling evangelists, carrying the gospel of flight to rural America.

What set Turner apart even then was his refusal to be ordinary. He designed his own uniform - powder blue, tailored close, with gold braid running the length of the collar and cuffs, a Sam Browne belt cinched across the chest, and a waxed mustache curled at the ends. It was not mere vanity. Turner understood that people don’t buy the ride - they buy the character. Any pilot with a patched airframe can give you five minutes aloft. Only Roscoe Turner could give you five minutes aloft with Roscoe Turner.

Roscoe Turner and Gilmore the Lion

In 1927, Turner struck a sponsorship deal with the Gilmore Oil Company out of California. Gilmore was a major gasoline brand on the West Coast whose corporate mascot was a lion. Turner painted his travel aircraft in Gilmore’s red and gold colors and became the company’s flying ambassador, crisscrossing the country to put the Gilmore name in front of every aviation crowd he could find.

Then he went further. Turner acquired a lion cub and named him Gilmore.

He had a custom-fitted, leather-padded wooden box installed in the cockpit, with a harness built to keep the cub secure during flight. He also had a small parachute made for the animal - if the aircraft went down and Turner made it out, Gilmore would go out right alongside him. The cub flew coast to coast, state to state, airfield to airfield, growing up surrounded by radial engines and high-octane fuel and the particular madness of the American barnstorming circuit.

Turner kept Gilmore for years, until the cat had grown to something approaching 150 pounds and moving a nearly full-grown lion by aircraft had evolved from charming eccentricity into genuine logistical burden. By then, it had served its purpose: Turner had built a national audience that no other pilot in America could match.

The Thompson Trophy Race: What Was It?

The National Air Races at Cleveland ran most years from the late 1920s through 1939. On race day, 200,000 people packed the grandstands - one of the largest sporting events in Depression-era America. Radio broadcasts carried the action across the country. Newsreel footage ran in theaters the following week. The air races were front-page news in every major newspaper in the country.

The marquee event was the Thompson Trophy Race, named for Charles Thompson, a Cleveland industrialist who funded the prize. It was a closed-course pylon race: tall metal pylons marked a circuit roughly ten miles around, and aircraft flew it lap after lap, as fast as they could manage, until the laps were complete.

The aircraft bore no resemblance to anything ordinary flying had to offer. Purpose-built racing machines with radial engines developing 800 to 1,200 horsepower in race trim. Retractable landing gear. Wing profiles calculated for maximum speed at low altitude. Cockpits so tight around the pilot there was no room for anything nonessential. By the mid-1930s, the fastest competitors were doing 250 to 260 miles per hour - pushing toward 300 - around those pylons, close enough to the grandstands that spectators could watch the pilot’s head moving in the cockpit.

Men died at the Thompson with enough regularity that the aviation press began each race year with an unspoken question about who it would be this time. The country went every year and filled the grandstands anyway.

Turner’s Three Thompson Trophy Wins

1932: Turner flew his first Thompson in a Wedell-Williams racer, designed by Louisiana aircraft builder James Wedell - a largely self-taught designer of rare talent producing the fastest piston-engine aircraft in America out of a workshop that looked like it had no business doing so. Turner placed second. He placed second again in 1933.

Finishing second in the Thompson Trophy Race is not a small thing. The field was full of pilots who would have given a great deal to finish where Turner finished. But second was not what he was there for.

1934: Turner won. He flew every pylon of that race the way a man flies when he has been second for two years and has arrived at the conclusion that second is no longer acceptable - tight on the pylons, low and fast, demanding everything the engine had from start to finish. His average speed was 248 miles per hour. At the time, that was faster than most of the military fighters the Army Air Corps was operating.

He did not win in 1935 or 1936. The competition was evolving fast and the aircraft kept improving. James Wedell was killed in a crash in 1934, a loss that hit Turner hard and hit the racing community harder. Wedell was one of those rare designers who could see solutions that everyone else was still formulating questions about.

Turner came back with a new machine. Working with aircraft designer Lawrence Brown, he built the Laird-Turner Meteor, powered by a Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp Junior engine modified in race trim to approximately 1,200 horsepower. He flew it until he knew it the way he knew his own hands.

1938: Turner was 42 years old. In air racing, where younger pilots had the reflexes and the still-intact conviction that consequences happened to other people, 42 was considered beyond competition. He won anyway - flying a race of such precise, controlled intensity that the younger pilots never got close to him.

1939: His final race. His third Thompson Trophy. Turner was 44 years old. He set a course record, flying faster around those pylons than any man ever had. When he taxied to the ramp and shut down the engine and climbed out into the afternoon light, the gold braid on his collar catching the sun, he knew he was done. Three Thompson Trophies. No one else has matched it.

In addition to the Thompsons, Turner earned multiple Harmon Trophies - the highest honor in American aviation - and set speed records across the continent.

Training 3,000 Pilots for World War II

When World War II came, Turner was too old for combat. He opened a flight school in Indianapolis, Indiana: the Roscoe Turner Aeronautical Corporation. During the war years, that school trained more than 3,000 military pilots.

Those pilots went on to fly P-51 Mustangs over Germany and F4U Corsairs over the Pacific - men who flew bombers and transports and fighters in every theater of the war, men who might not have survived their first engagements without the foundation they built in Indianapolis. The barnstormer from Corinth, Mississippi, the man with the lion and the gold braid and the waxed mustache, trained three thousand pilots who went to war. That is a legacy that has nothing to do with spectacle and everything to do with what the spectacle was always actually in service of.

Turner kept the school running after the war ended and stayed in aviation until his health made it impossible. He died in 1970 at age 74. He was among the first pilots inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

Why Roscoe Turner’s Story Still Matters

Turner came from nothing. No advantages, no connections, no mentor to open doors. What he built, he built on a refusal to be forgotten - and on the intelligence to understand that aviation in those years needed more than pilots. It needed champions. It needed people who made the rest of the world look up and decide that flying mattered.

The barnstormers and air racers of the golden age filled the grandstands in Cleveland and kept aviation on the front pages during the years when public enthusiasm for flight needed to take root. Without that audience, without that love embedded in the culture, it becomes harder to imagine the country producing the greatest air force in the history of warfare on the timeline it did.

Roscoe Turner didn’t just race airplanes. He sold aviation to a country that was still making up its mind about whether the whole thing was real.

Key Takeaways

Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy Race three times - 1934, 1938, and 1939 - a record unmatched in the history of the National Air Races.
He flew with a lion cub named Gilmore in a custom leather-padded cockpit harness, complete with a small parachute, as part of a sponsorship deal with the Gilmore Oil Company.
His 1934 Thompson average speed of 248 mph exceeded most Army Air Corps fighters of the era.
He won his final Thompson in 1939 at age 44, setting a course record on his last competitive race.
After retiring from racing, his Indianapolis flight school trained more than 3,000 military pilots who served in World War II.